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Vertascale said SimpleSearch, which the company calls the Search Engine for Hadoop, provides an immediate benefit to engineers, data scientists and business analysts looking for faster "time to answer" on big data.

"Users want to quickly identify subsets of data stored in Hadoop for export to their existing analysis and reporting tools," Lee Paries, a Vertascale advisor and vice president of sales for Teradata Aster, said in a statement. "Vertascale's approach is intriguing because it's an alternative to the slow, batch processing nature of MapReduce. Real-time big data query and analysis is a missing piece today."

Further reading

While Hadoop has been successful in addressing the problems of big data storage and batch processing, Vertascale's founders recognized early on that in order to democratize access to big data, users needed an intuitive ad-hoc query capability.

Analysts and users alike tend to agree that among the obstacles hindering wider adoption of big data is the lack of tools that make it easier to take advantage of big data and frameworks such as Hadoop. According to Wikibon, "The well-publicized lack of analytic specialists and data scientists armed with both the technical skill and business acumen to derive insights from large, multi-structured data sets merged from disparate sources," is one of the obstacles to broader adoption of big data. Products like SimpleSearch could help to overcome this obstacle.

However, despite any obstacles, Wikibon said the total big data market reached $11.4 billion in 2012, is projected to reach $18.1 billion in 2013, and is on pace to exceed $47 billion by 2017.

"Big data is everywhere," said Vertascale CTO Geoffrey Hendrey in a statement. "Today's problem is less about storing data and more about being able to actually find what you're looking for in the data. Everyone working with big data is challenged by the 'I don't know what I don't know' problem, and the prohibitively long iteration cycles. SimpleSearch lets you find, explore and export large data sets quickly and easily in a way that's scalable and cost-effective. We believe that by speeding up the time-to-answer for engineers, business analysts and data scientists, we can provide a critical advantage to organizations that deploy SimpleSearch."

Vertascale President James Ladd said, "With the rapid adoption of Hadoop, companies that recognize the value inherent in their data are also looking for simplicity and speed in querying big data. With SimpleSearch, Vertascale is solving these problems."

Vertascale, a venture-backed startup based in Menlo Park, Calif., has been named as a Strata 2013 Startup Showcase Finalist. The company will be demonstrating SimpleSearch at the O'Reilly Strata 2013 Conference, which runs Feb. 27 and 28 in Santa Clara, Calif. To register for the SimpleSearch beta program, go here.